The Ochre Archives blogsite enables me to record for my own future reference and to share various learnings and experiences, many of which are connected with the farm that Jan and I purchased in 2003, "Ochre Arch", Grenfell, Australia.
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Tuesday, 13 September 2011

Removal of Stump from Large Sugar Gum

Further to our blog of 1st September 2011 sharing some of the details of having the large Sugar Gum tree out the front of the house here removed - today Maurice from Lachlan Valley Tree Services returned with his trusty stump grinder to remove the stump.

Here you can see the 'Red Roo' SP8018 stump grinder positioned over the stump prior to the start of the job. These 80 horsepower machines cost on the order of $80,000 and are a serious bit of gear.

Here is a close-up of some of the 32 tungsten tips 'teeth' on the cutter wheel. They comfortably handle timber and soil, and can be used for cutting rock and concrete - but the latter is tough going. Steel if in the soil or timber causes considerable damage to the teeth.

The machine is controlled via this handy wireless remote control unit.

The above photograph was taken about half way through the removal process. The dark area you can see in the middle of the stump is a large white ant nest.

Here's a close-up of a section of the white ant nest.

The above photo was taken at the completion of the grinding effort. There was a very large amount of wood chips mixed earth with produced during the process, with the actual stump proving to have been about 50 cm deep in all.

We agreed with Maurice that we would move the excess mulch ourselves. Here you can see our trusty trailer almost fully loaded.

We moved the mulch to a couple of 'scalded' areas of bare earth in the Yabby Dam Paddock. One spot is below. Our hope is that over time this added organic matter will encourage vegetation to grow and rainfall runoff to reduce.

The photo above is one of the other scalded areas in the Yabby Dam Paddock just to the west of the dam, with the mulch placed at the down-side of the contour bank.

The vast majority of the timber in the stump is pulverised into quite fine pieces, but you can see in the above photo that some pieces are pretty 'chunky'. This happens when pieces break off rather than be ground off.

The above shot shows the 'finished product' after we'd removed the excess mulch and done a tad of leveling. We do expect that over time the material that is in the hole where the stump was will compact and break down. At that time we plan on bringing in some topsoil to level things off again.

It's good to now have the whole job of removing the massive and dangerous tree complete.

About Me

I grew up on the family farm at Grenfell in Australia, obtained a degree in Agricultural Economics from the University of New England and spent just over 25 years working for the National Australia Bank (the last 8 of which were in senior project, change management and representative roles) in Sydney, Orange, Wollongong and Melbourne. In 2003 Jan and I bought a farm, "Ochre Arch", Grenfell as an investment enabling us to reconnect with the land. We now live on and work at and from the farm.